Tutorials, news reactions, tool notes, personal miscellany, and observations outside the main topics.
At a New Year's Eve house party a few years ago, I met someone who had graduated from Harvard Business School. Among other topics, I brought up something I couldn't figure out: why would someone pay $200,000 [https://www.hbs.edu/mba/Pages/cost-of-attendance-class-of-2023.aspx] for something you could just
In the spirit of documenting my thought process instead of already-formed thoughts, here are my impressions from the recent DevConnect – a major week-long gathering of the web3 developer community in Amsterdam. * Many web3 companies are default-global. Most don't mention where they are based, because it doesn't matter. The community is organized more around
This is a short workshop I gave at the Road to Web3 online hackathon: a brief demo of NFTPort [https://nftport.xyz/]'s APIs to people who have a rough understanding of what NFT [https://www.taivo.ai/notes/__nft/]s are. If you are not one of those people, the original NFT standard spec (ERC-721) [https://eips.
Rationally valuing equity for startup employees
As I wrote before, I ended my startup journey [https://www.taivo.ai/startup-year] in November and started looking for a job. A lot has happened between then and now. I've spoken to tons of people, looked at a broad range of options, and decided to join one early-stage company. It felt weird to announce [https:
I recently started drinking coffee again. Caffeine has always had the effect of narrowing my focus and reducing mind-wandering. The downside is, caffeine makes me less likely to get into diffuse mode, the other main mode of thinking. Focused mode means taking a direct, head-on approach to work: writing an email on your laptop, reading an article, or
Peter Thiel has [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050143-zero-to-one] a 2x2 matrix: indefinite vs. definite, and optimist vs. pessimist. I want to be a definite optimist: imagine a better future and work to build it. Recently, I've been more of an indefinite optimist. * Hoping that startup inspiration hits, without a concrete plan to make
This is a hidden gem: Estonia's pitch as a startup country, almost 30 years ago. As far as I know, it hasn't been on the Internet yet. This video (and an accompanying paper publication) was distributed in 1993 by the Estonian Privatisation Agency to invite foreign investors to Estonia. A few highlights: * "Estonia has in
You could separate work from life. As in the phrase "work-life balance", work versus life. They can be separate buckets with separate goals, time slots, people, and emotions. Separation definitely makes sense. Work lets us pay for rent and groceries, but might not be fulfilling. Time with friends, hobbies, reading, side-projects -- it's all enjoyable
The single biggest thing that made me a better friend, partner, colleague, and mentor came from an unexpected place. Two years ago, I was working through a breakup and rethinking how I approach all relationships. At a conference in Berlin, I happened to participate in a Circling workshop. It's is easy to experience but hard to verbalize. Like.
